The Chrysler in the gorge
In the deep beauty of the Spencer Gorge, a rusting car corrupts the scene
It wasn’t the Lost Ark, Holy Grail, or even King Solomon’s Mines. But when we found the near-mythical Chrysler chassis at the end of our long quest through Spencer Gorge, the clouds parted and golden trumpets filled the heavens with a jubilant tantara.
OK, they didn’t. But reaching it, well, that was a “moment,” at least for us.
With a couple of stops for reconnaissance and conversation, we were just over an hour’s hike in, where the Spencer creek joins the Logie, when the moment came. And here, good reader, I must pause.
I didn’t know. I mean, I knew but ... oh, the beauty of it. The gorge. The perfect, brittle, misty stillness. To experience it this way, picking our sometimes treacherous way up, down and along a slender trail, faint as a weak pulse, along the Tews side.
Towering walls of sheer rock and forest growth at times seemed to close in around us, on both flanks of the creek, then open up as we straddled a ridge, the vista shifting, then enclose again, in a succession of geological architecture, like the urban canyons of Manhattan unfolding block after block, but minus the people and the hand of man.
Bert saw it first. The chassis.
Bert Millar. Our expedition leader. He loped along ahead of us, nimble-footed, with a pullstart, cut-off saw strapped to his back, fording the stream as surely as if he were following a
floor chart.
I followed behind with photographer Gary Yokoyama; Alan Hansell took up the rear.
Alan’s the one who told me about the chassis. He began Stewards of the Cootes Watershed four years ago. It now has 600-plus members, volunteers who, among much else, scour these parts, cleaning up, every weekend.
A team of them found the chassis in September.
Years ago, it must have been pushed over the lip of the gorge, a little beyond the Webster’s Falls parking lot. It would have plunged past a sheer outcropping of rock, 100 metres tall, to land in the low growth and shrub halfway up the steep, sloping escarpment.
The carcass of the old Chrysler, early 1970s vintage, rots there on the hillside, in its soft bed of amber leaves and mossy flat rock, just below the bottom of the outcropping. Once Bert got over the hogback behind which it was obscured, he announced, “Here!” And there it was, its dark rusting mass, scabbing the natural terrain.
“It’s probably been there 30 years or more,” says Alan. Teenagers perhaps sent it over for a kick. I could almost hear the ghost of their hooting as they watched the spectacle of its flight over the edge.
“We’ve found many things, but this takes the cake,” says Alan. “We’re getting it out, like you’d eat an elephant, one bite at a time.”
Bert led the way up the last little elevation. He’s 69. Retired from decades in auto glass.
“I love being out here.”
I know. The rawness and ruggedness. Gnarly roots roping over each other under your feet, momentarily surfacing from the subterranean circuitry of the gorge’s tree system.
On those steep rises, everything stopped for me. The silence, the cliff heights like gothic spires, thrusting upwards on both sides of the winding creek. Even the ever-present rushing sound of the creek seemed part of the silence, as though it were coming from inside my head, a beat in my temples. No daily worry, no impending bill or deadline, no headline about Trump, could penetrate here.
At the chassis (with remains of the engine, transmission, bumpers, axles) Bert cut into the leaf spring, strapping and rear differential with the saw. Bite by bite, they’ll get it out.
Later, we headed back, past the burned-out teenage party pit, like a charred eagle’s nest high up one of the cliffs, and the odd plastic bottle and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer can.
Soon the clouds would close over our interlude. We’d return to the city, with bits of chassis. And cliffs of wonder uploaded forever into my memory. Thanks, Stewards of Cootes Watershed. Thanks, uploaders.